The Second Eden Bride
by lye tea
Summary: Fear is knowing that you persist to exist. Understanding that you’re too in love with yesterday. Repost!fic. /implied Sirius x Hermione/


**A/N: **Super old fic I dug up. This was written before the seventh book came out, complete speculation on my part. Repost.

* * *

**The Second Eden Bride**

"The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest."

**_Isaiah 34:14_**

Beyond Babel is a second city,  
Where misery and scarlet dwell,  
And along these rivers and shores,  
Is Nebuchadnezzar and his Queen,  
The second bride of Eden,  
And Babylon's own whore-mother.

--

Once Upon A Time, there were such things like fairy-tales, and now, they are dead.

The "good" loses, and the "bad" wins. And that is life. And that is irrevocable. And that is the ecumenical law of the governing universe since genesis, since the first reincarnation, since syncretism. Since—

Life Goes On.

Armageddon had ended in morbid disasters (which were to be expected because this is Not A Fairy-Tale), and the survivors wondered if they would have been better off not so. _Crucio_ is just a word. So is death, so is culmination, so is _it's all over now_. Eschewal is a small, petty thing. Sullen and dull, Hermione lives.

_Life Goes On._

Harry has deteriorated (and she is resigned). Ron has fragmented into dust and varnish and pebbly aches (and she is fine). Her only regret and desperation is that she's beginning to look malnourished. It is one thing to show, and all together another to know it. But here she is, once again, learning a lesson—a second erudition on the etiquette of—that's entirely futile and annoying, come to think.

Delicate and religious in reminding herself that: For her, love is not infinite. It is viciously, treacherously accurate. Unwanted too, like a literal liturgy.

Tonight, Hermione dreamt she was sitting back, fidgeting, in a café's spindly chair, in a dress, in vermillion lipstick, ready to elope. Then, she woke up remembering that she really wasn't her. Remembers that she never had a cat-mouth. Remembers that she is still plain Lady Jane Grey.

--

"I miss them."

"I do too," Hermione adds quietly. Because it would be forbidden and bizarre and tellingly horrible if she didn't.

--

Fear is knowing that you persist to exist. Understanding that you're too in love with yesterday.

Watching Ginny cry was like killing herself repetitively, and the monotony does get to her after a while. Ginny laments in shrills and wails, not subdued, quite-plaintive-quiet sadness. She mourns loudly, irritatingly, pathetic and flagrant and all too real.

Hermione screams at herself for the bitterness breeding, festering, feasting on her squirming insides—

But outwardly she smoothes out Ginny's scorching, hellish hair with trembling hands and tells her that everything will be okay. ('Cause that girl is starting to not look so good and sane anymore.)

_Lacrimosa_,  
When dead men come to rise up from ashes,  
_Dona eis requiem,_  
Where to count their bland stretched hanging skins and pale hunger,  
_Sanctus, Benedictus—Hosanna,_  
While in the palais, what they said is called: Mercy (or illness).

So, together, they drink to make-shift peace and stale love growing eternally cold in purgatory. With convulsions that will hurt forever.

--

Tonks and Lupin are all awkward angles and outlandish contortions standing next to each other, entwined in self-lulling calm and invisible reconciliations. She tries to curl her lips in a gruesomely mauled mimicry of a feminine smile, and he simply looks terrified.

Today, her hair is black, and she falls into Lethe while his thin strands are starkly white from age. She is nearly as tall as him. And both are elongated by some erratic happiness, with their shadows curling and enfolding twice over and over, left and right, up and _up_.

It is disgusting that Hermione can see herself looking equally as ridiculous. (But never in black.)

"Hey, congratulations. Honestly." _Honestly_. See, there is no lie here. Only wine that's too sour and overly piquant, brewed and fermented with old withered apricots.

"So what will you name her?" Hermione asks.

"Eve." And Lupin replies. "After no one's mother."

It is rather funny how these things work out.

--

Scared and lonely, Hermione turns twenty-seven. At long last. Now, the ghosts can finally remain silent (in this waste of a place you call advent's coming).

But this will continue and _eventually_ pass by her too. Because the poison is bad (again). Because Eden is one of those things that can't be taught or inoculated or strapped down for a single moment. To Listen. It swarms around her head, emerging as bees in Parliament, and refuses to disappear.

And so, Hermione departs. It is a fitting conclusion, she thinks. A pseudo-nearly and semi-decent Happily Ever After, she thinks. She thinks: it has been too long.

And so, she leaves Adam (forever)—

All Alone.


End file.
